20/ And how do the researchers recommend doing this?
The researchers note that you cannot reduce cases, and real world cases tend to be rich with many concepts. So ... the researchers recommend using a hypermedia system to store cases.
That is: a backlinked note taking system!
Conversation
21/ Here's what you do: you get the student to store cases, and highlight concepts within the text of each case. Concepts are backlinked. They go to other cases.
There are many variations. Some systems come preloaded with cases, marked up by expert practitioners.
1
26
22/ The initial presentation to the student is also chosen carefully. When presenting a concept for the first time, you want to give a student a case, and then give them a different case that is VERY different from the first.
So the student internalises that cases are variable!
2
2
30
23/ Eventually, as the student does concept searches in the CFT system, they begin to overlearn the 'crossroad' cases — that is, the central cases that are the most conceptually rich and therefore the most connected.
These cases begin to be evoked from even small fragments.
1
1
19
24/ Once this happens, the student enters something called 'epitome mode', where case comparisons happen at the speed of thought.
In other words, they have a set of representative cases in their heads, available for on-the-fly schema assembly in the real world.
1
2
33
25/ Ok, I'll wrap up. A couple of days ago, I said that it's probably worth it to dig for cognitive science results in the tools for thought space.
CFT is an example of what I was talking about.
Quote Tweet
Increasingly curious as to why the tools-for-thought folk talk a lot about note-taking tool features and plugins and not at all about the cognitive science of better externalised thinking.
Show this thread
1
1
25
26/ If you enjoyed this thread, you should read the full essay, which goes into way more detail on how to create a CFT system for yourself:
3
4
64
Replying to
I found this article fascinating, it looks like it builds on the zettlekasten ideas in a very practical way, but do you have any results or even anecdotes of people using this note taking system? It seems very embryonic.
1
Replying to
So good news and bad news: the good news is that there are 30 years worth of system implementations, and papers published about them.
Bad news: I can’t access many of these papers since they’re not on sci-hub and I’m not in an academic institution with access.
1
1
Replying to
Oh well. I'm particularly interested in your note taking implementation. Has anyone approached you to say it helped them learn "X"?
1
1
Replying to
I ran a case library test a month ago, and we got some feedback and generated some data, but honestly it’s too early to tell. These things take time unfortunately; check back in a … year?